In our communication to you last November, we promised to get back to you after the holidays with new information about the 2008 Insomnia Film Festival. We’re writing today to tell you that we are unable to re-schedule the festival as we had hoped.

We know that many of you were disappointed when we postponed the Festival last year, and that this news may also disappoint you. Working hard to meet your expectations is always a top priority for us, and we deeply regret it when we fall short. Please accept our apologies.

Please also know that our commitment to providing you with the best tools for creativity and innovation is unwavering and that we constantly seek new and better ways to showcase your artistic expression. We would like to continue to inform you of opportunities to participate in Apple creative festivals and other activities. Unless you object, we will keep you on our list for future notices.

Wednesday, 28 January 2009

Soz, can't be bothered to write the next bit of TSTS tonight. But I've got a new idea for a story or whatever. I just need to make it into a story, a sequence of events. At the mo it's just an idea, a personality of the main character. Sigh.

Tuesday, 27 January 2009

Another Short Story for ya. This one is based on one hell of a weird dream I had a few days back, so don't sue me if it doesn't make sense. Only Natalie knows the actual dream, so for half of you visitors it will be a new concept. Dedicated to James Stewart, the actor, 'cause I used his name.

They stare, They stare

PART ONE

The Stewart family were having an enjoyable holiday. Their guide, Ulric, was gesturing with his large hands to this and that direction at the devastated street. He was muttering something in his deep, growly voice.

To the left and right of Emma Stewart and her mother and father were 1940s-style buildings, square and dirty and completely devastated, thrown to the earth by various shellings in the Second World War. Around the buildings lay scattered clothes and toys, all remnants of the last dwellers in the houses.

A path had been cleared in the middle of the road for the tourists to be guided through, but apart from that the scene remained untouched, as if the catastrophic shelling had just happened yesterday.

Ulric stopped suddenly in the middle of the road, and turned round. Beyond him was a roundabout: similarly scattered with bits of brick and 1940s style furnishings that should have belonged in a house ten metres away, and sixty years ago. A road led off beyond Ulric, and one to the left and right also. Front the Stewarts' viewpoint, these roads looked just the same as the one they were in, though maybe slightly less destroyed as they were not as close to where the shell had landed. To the Stewarts, the whole town (well, more a web of preserved streets) set an eerie floor to the seemingly unending blue sky above them. Well, that was to be expected of the country.

Ulric's large hands fell to his sides. He became dead still, eyes wide open and ears metaphorically so. Emma Stewart, of only ten years, grabbed hold of her mother's hand as Ulric cocked his head to one side. Her mother's hand held hers back.

A steady wind blew past the foursome; a still vignette amongst the untouched houses. Modern plastic bags flew beside their feet.

"Ulric?" Emma's father said fearfully, his voice unusually high. "Are you alright?"

Ulric remained still as a post, the only sign of life on his tense body his chest oscillating jerkily. "Wait there," he stated in his gruff, local accent, "I must check something."

And so the tour guide walked towards the roundabout, arms still motionless. His walking was slow, restrained, controlled: more like a small march than a relaxed walk. At the roundabout, as the Stewarts watched on, he turned right with a swift movement. And walked on, to the right. As soon as he passed behind the houses on the right, still in the middle of the street, all went silent and still.

The wind stopped blowing. Plastic bags fell to the floor. The Stewarts stood paralyzed, waiting for the man's return.

After five minutes or so, Emma's father became seriously worried. He himself began walking towards the roundabout, and his family followed, Emma running forward to grab his hand. The wind had still stopped, the sky still showed not a fleck of white cloud.

And the three Stewarts met the roundabout in a surreal moment of shock. For, to the right of the roundabout sat a scene, as the writers would say, out of context.

As the Stewarts stared with wide eyes at the scene before them, Mr Stewart's camera dropped to the ground, many hundred euros in insurance now very much needed. Mrs Stewart's handbag dropped from its position on her shoulder. However, the soft toy lemur Emma grasped stayed firmly within her fist, fingers white with shock.

The street to the right was a paradox in time and space, or so it seemed to the Stewarts. A destroyed house flanked either side of the start of the street they saw before before them, but after that all was different.

After that there was no rubble, no debris, not plastic bags, no 1940s clothes, toys or anything else reminiscent of the rest of the expected thing to see round that corner. Not even any Ulric.

Instead there stood a long, straight road going up a rolling hill. The road was new, pristine, the grey tarmac glittering in the midday sun. And to the sides of it were endless houses.

But not the houses you and I have discussed.

These were white, clean, immaculate, with Greek verandas, balconies, white roof tiles, white pipes, houses that looked like they hadn't seen a day's bad weather in their existence.

And they hadn't.

The only style to describe theses houses is that of those in LA, in Hollywood, the houses of the stars, ones which you may see Brad Pitt outside of. But this is not that kind of story. In the street to the right there were no palm trees, no celebrities, no newspapers on doorsteps, no 4x4s.

Instead, the front gardens of the houses were grassed over with a clean stone path, flanked with high hedges cut into geometrically perfect shapes. All was clean and perfect in this paradise under the harsh blue sky. But that was not all that was in the gardens.

There were children.

Well, more teenagers than children. Tall children with long gangly arms and legs, boys and girls. All with black hair, and all dressed in the same white suits, loose-fitting trousers and long-sleeved shirts.

The teenagers were all busy playing around in the gardens of the mansions, many of them sitting atop the high hedges with objects like yo-yos.

All that could be heard was the soft 'phut's of footballs being kicked against mansion walls.

And the Stewarts took this all in. From the teenagers to the mansions to the hedges to the petrifying stillness and normality that softly covered the eeriness and surreality of the scene that lay before them.

Mr Stewart was the first to react, steadily pacing forward with Emma and subsequently his wife in tow. As they passed over the transition from dull 1940s devastated remains to pristine LA high-class living, the eeriness took a new high and things became seriously creepy.

"What is this place?" Emma whispered as the three silently strode along the road.

"I - I don't know..." Her father gasped. "But I'm sure we can get through this place. The people back at the tourist centre can he - help us out."

Now, in a normal circumstance, the stereotypical personalities of men and women would prevail and Mrs Stewart would say they should ask one of the teenagers for directions and help, at which Mr Stewart would scoff and get slightly grumpy and say no. However, it is universally agreed that, in some circumstances, this sort of behaviour is not necessary nor relevant.

This is one of those circumstances.

"Mummy," Emma whispered in a trembling voice, "where are their faces?"

And, true enough, Mrs Stewart also noticed that startling fact. All faces were hidden from the Stewarts: teenagers played football against the houses, their backs to the tourists. Other had their heads held low. All the threesome could see was the carefully combed black hair over obscured faces. If any.

So the three paced along the endless street, the eery bubble of the surreal scene closing in on them, and the dull red and brown colours of the 1940s remains becoming smaller and smaller behind them.

Sorry, gotta stop writing, and it's a good place to pause anyway, so I've split it into two or three parts and I'll try to get the next one done tomorrow. Hope you enjoyed that part!!

Monday, 26 January 2009

A poem I wrote for my History homework about WW1. Soz, I just wanted to provide you guys with something else creative, other than just "I went to Bluewater". I had one heck of a dream last night, it was so freaky. I'm just thinking whether to write it down as a short story and put it up here or not. Then you can tell me what it means! It seems I either have no dreams, or I have nightmares. Always based on a different mood of film, I've seen. If only I could remember that sci-fi one I had a few months ago. This dream... I can only compare it to a very scary, more horrific mood of The Stepford Wives, if you've ever seen that.

Saturday, 24 January 2009

Rejk hit the ground running.
His breath flew from his mouth in a cloud of orange pixels. The inbuilt compass told him of his location, and that of the People. He rolled on the ceiling and came across another Baer. Dammit, they were everywhere. He'd have to clean them off when he was done.
A Person came into view, its hengs flapping madly like some sort of organic being. Rejk knew better: Rejk acted, tripping the gravity. Time stood still. Gravity went sidewards, and Rejk flew through the frontier. Now was the time.
He swung with his lower heng, it colliding with the Person as its body was deleted from the Stage. Time flew backwards and Rejk was flung back into Stasis. He breathed out. The breath was in blue pixels now: it seemed like Control was happy with him. So he got up and went to get a recharge from the nearest realPoint. Wait... where was it? All that was around Rejk was...was...
Forty quadrillion pixels crashed and died. Control's power circuits sparked out their own brains. The World broke down.
Rejk and fifty-five billion other Inhabitants were thrown into substasis, their existance and memories flung into unknown storage.
Control shut the Computer down. And hooked the Inhabitants up to another World. Sure, it was a little crowded without them, but they'd need a while to fix up the old one. It could work.
The Control plug snapped to the Control point, and the second World showed a population increase of fifty-five billion.
Rejk hit the ground running. Nothing had just happened.

Sunday, 11 January 2009

Today I went to Bluewater and got loads of cool stuff! Well, firstly we went to John Lewis to buy some rugs and sofas or summin. We bought one rug: for my sister's newly-designed bedroom. Which has slightly pink walls instead of white walls. Gee, I never noticed that.

After looking at some snazzy desks, me and my dad wandered off whilst my mum went to the café / restaurant / whatever, and ate some blueberry muffins. So, firstly, after getting lost and asking if they sold the iPhone in a Vodafone store, we came across the big Apple...the coolerest store to ever exist! OMG! After realizing they didn't sell Adobe CS4, and looking around the cool iMacs and iPhones and iPods and MacBooks and Mac Pros, we decided to get down to business. So after a succession of Apple Staff (none of whom were Final Cut specialists), we got to a guy called Tom (see picture). So he brought us to an iMac and answered all my questions about Final Cut Express. It was so cool: he was completely mad, or at least he just acted like it. Apparently he uses Final Cut in his own time, so he's a film maker too. I got most of my questions answered, and the ones he didn't know the answer to, no one knew the answer to. So that was successful.
Next up: the Lego shop! Double yay! My dad was getting impatient by then since we'd left my mum in the John Lewis café for quite some time and who knows how many blueberry muffins she'd had, so I had to quickly buy the sets and get the hell out of there. Which was a shame, 'cause I had £30 in my pocket and I could have bought something bigger, but ah well. More money for the online pick-a-brick I'm gonna do later this month. So I left the greatest shop in the world (well, maybe) with a little Pirates set and the most lime green Power Miners set I could get my hands on for a small price. I'll be reviewing those later at Brickspace .
So, after another short time at John Lewis (in which I bought a pack of CD-RWs, a screen cleaner thing, and set off an extremely loud iWeb tutorial on one of their show Macs), we were out, and here I am. Phew, what a day! oh yeah, don't forget to subscribe to 101 Brickfilms , newly updated and all!

Saturday, 10 January 2009

Ok, I think it's time for another of my big catch-up posts. Dammit, I've got to post more frequently on this thing.Firstly, I've been doing a lot of MOCing, as you would have guessed from my last post. One or tow of the MOCs described on it don't have a link: that's 'cause I haven't uploaded them to MOCpages yet. Don't know whether I should ruin my celebrity status on MOCpages. Not one, but TWO people who've added me as their favourite builders, AND I'm moderator of the Vignettes group (set up by Sean Kenney, MOCpages admin), AND I am the admin of three other groups. I'm also sorting out my whole LEGO® collection into little divider boxes, as can be seen in this picture of my room how it was for most of today:

Yeah, not much of a mess, but if you're trying to sort it all out, then it's a nightmare. AND you didn't have to clean it up in the end. AND, now, unfortunately, I've run out of divider boxes: every single compartment is full. What am I gonna do?? BTW, WIP stands for Work In Progress (a little term I learnt off MOCpages). The stuff in that section is as follows: some tracks, lots of hubcaps, large tires, rubbery frames, LURPS and BURPS (rocky bricks) and a little case frame thing. What are these for? I guess you'll find out soon enough...

Next up: JVK! Yes, Jørgen had another comic published this month, a New Year's special, seven days late. Ah well, you can't have everything. Check it out, and lots of new features too, on Jåm .

Saw the behind-the-scenes feature on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I don't think Steven Spielberg is as pretentious as I thought he was. Which is good. But how more slick and greasy can George Lucas' hair get? And he's fat. Pfft.

Please note this blog has sadly died (on 1/1/12). You can still read all the posts etc, but I have moved my work/links/portfolio to wndalton.com

My name is John. This is my blog.

On JOHNSPACE you can find posts on a plethora of topics, though design, art, typography and Denmark are the usual suspects. I also post movie reviews, chat about my spectacularly uninteresting life and show you guys the latest stuff I've created. Enjoy!

Last year I did a 365-day blogging project. Check out the Crap Filter for its best posts.

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If you've been affected by any topics on this blog, then you get affected real easily. Try to toughen up, mate. The world's a grim place - buckle up and dry those tears of "he talked about design, boo hoo". Shit happens.